Google has a built-in consumption-oriented bias that sometimes does not take CONTENT PRODUCERS likes us into consideration.

Granted, free platforms like Google Documents, Google Calendar,Google Translation, Google Maps, and Google Sites are of course geared towards increasing production efficiency and I use all of them. I’m thankful to Google for them. That’s great.

But Google’s relentless drive to eliminate desktops is not always in line with the need of technical communicators for powerful production machines. We need desktops to get the job done right.

To browse the Internet and click one link after another is one thing…

To design, write, illustrate, and single-source a 1,000-page user manual with illustrations, an Index, conditional text, an accompanying website and help file… is another.

But what about us, the technical writers, communicators, and workers of the digital age who create every single web page that’s out there?

How are we going to run our increasingly heavy multi-featured applications on increasingly light-weight “notebooks”, “thin clients” or “cloud terminals”?

What will Google publish when the last “content producer” turns off the lights and leaves the last room that had a powerful desktop in the corner? What then?

I hope we’ll always have powerful production machines in the future, whether they are called “desktops” or not. As a professional content producer, I can’t understand or imagine the kind of world John Herlihy wants to live in.